Drawlloween 2016: Days 30 and 31

Good news to all those out there who don’t like Halloween or art or Halloween art or just my particular Halloween art in general…. You don’t have to ignore these any more because today is the last day of Drawlloween 2016 in Inktober!!

Day 30 is: SKULLS AND SKELETONS

Day 31 is: TRICK ‘R’ TREAT!

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I really couldn’t come up with a good angle for these two, so I just drew whatever and inked it in. It’s a jack-o-lantern with some of what I imaged skulls and skeletons of pumpkins might look like if gourds had endoskeletal structures.

If I decide to do it next year I will be back, if not, you’re welcome.

Drawlloween 2016: Days 28 and 29

Day 28 calls for: GHOSTS A GO GO

Day 29 specifies: BLACK CATURDAY

The go-go dancers implied in this prompt necessitated some early 60s dance moves and surroundings for the spirits.

To complete the crossover in the sketchbook spread, I decided on “cat” as a slang term for a cool dude from the following decade and drew the cat in the finest 70s blaxploitation environment I could mange quickly on a Saturday afternoon. Groovy and Solid!

click this sucker!

click this sucker!

Drawlloween 2016: Day 9

Days 8 and 9 of Drawlloween 2016 are: “Eight Legs, One Thousand Eggs” and “He’s a Dummy, Doll.”

Trying to connect these two really specific prompts was a bit tricky. I decided to go with a “Charlotte’s Web” theme on the first, with all of Charlotte’s spider babies hatching out of the egg (I think spiders lay only one big egg sack, so I don’t know how accurate the “thousand eggs” bit is, but to be fair, they prompt never mentioned spiders) and webbing up poor Wilbur the pig.

If you wondered why Wilbur looks like Hamm, the piggy bank from “Toy Story”, then you would be informed of the reason when I added the other characters from that Pixar/Disney movie: Jessie and Woody, the western dolls. On day 9, they show up discovering a ventriloquist’s dummy who happens to be Edgar Bergen’s famous “Mortimer Snerd” character. Thus, the assigned phrase coming from Woody to Jessie now makes sense, and so does the fact that Hamm is the terrific pig that Charlotte wrote about in her web.

Here they are combined in ink in the sketchbook, and then scanned in and colored digitally.

click photo for larger view

click photo for larger view

Click to make larger

Click to make larger

click for larger version

click for larger version

Drawlloween 2016 Day 1: Return From The Dead!

Last year I participated in one of the online art challenges, like Inktober, in an effort to make myself draw more and draw on paper instead of digitally, the way I do most of my work now (except for party caricatures, of course, but if I get an iPad Pro and pencil one day, those may become digital too, if I can figure out how to print them out on the spot..)

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I liked the idea of Inktober because I enjoy black and white doodling in a sketchbook, and my son had just bought me yet another one for Xmas 2014 and I felt bad not using it or the other many sketchbooks that were “too nice” to mess up with just any crappy scribbling I had on my mind. The problem is always, “WHAT to draw??” and I work better with being assigned something than coming up with something on my own anyway, so I found that the Drawlloween list of “Halloweeny” drawing prompts fit the bill perfectly!

You can go back in the blog to see last year’s illustrations, or look at the two compilation collages I made after it was over, below:

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I wasn’t sure I could actually find the time EVERY damned day of the damned days of October to do the assigned subject in a way I felt appropriate (I almost always wanted to do a funny take on it, or at least TRY to be as original as one can be when contributing to a pool of art from other, talented and creative types who are also trying to be original and unique. However, to my surprise, I was able to get each day’s assignment done on time and eventually started trying to tie the two day, double-spreads together, which gave me another hurdle to jump each day, but made it more challenging and fun.

This year, I’m starting out easy, with just a title page and no further need to tie it to the (appropriately-named for the yearly animation of this dead blog) Day 1 prompt of: RETURN FROM THE DEAD

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click illustration to make larger

Since we lost so many great public figures this year, I wanted to pick a few that would be visually appealing enough to draw “returning from the dead” (not to belittle or make fun of their deaths, but to revere them enough to want them to come back!) So I picked David Bowie and Prince but put them in their Ziggy Stardust and Purple Rain periods of dress, pushing aside the mausoleum covers and tombstones and coloring the inks in real life with pencils instead of scanning and doing it digitally.

Day one is done. I will post a new one each day on my FacebookTwitterInstagramDeviant Art, and maybe Tumbler pages too, but if you are one of the very few people actually reading this, I plan to update this moribund blog each day as well (but probably only during the month of October.)